


Won’t You Be My Neighbor, Dr. Tozier?

by kaboomslang



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Good Parents Maggie & Wentworth Tozier, Grocery Store, Slice of Life, Went Tozier is a DILF (Dentist I’d Like to Fuck), blink and you miss it reddie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-19 04:22:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22971889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaboomslang/pseuds/kaboomslang
Summary: Dr. Tozier puts one hand just briefly on Richard’s dark mophead hair, like he’s giving the boy a blessing for his apple adventure. His hand is really quite broad, thinks Helen, popped out square at the thumb-joint.Matches that jawline of his,something whispers darkly in her stomach. Then the boy’s off, tearing down the aisle on a squeaking chariot of scuffed-gray sneakers and babbling what sounds like a Bugs Bunny impression, repeated on a loop.What’s up doc what’s up doc what’s up doc,fading around the corner to the fruit. Peculiar. Helen once saw the Tozier boy eat a worm at the park while pushing her youngest on the swings, after another solemn-eyed little boy with a faceful of freckles had carefully presented it to him in the sandbox. Most peculiar.
Comments: 34
Kudos: 215





	Won’t You Be My Neighbor, Dr. Tozier?

Wentworth Tozier starts going gray at thirty-two years old when his son Richie is five, and it’s all the church women’s group can talk about... indirectly, of course. Oh, but he’s so young. Oh, he’ll be balding next. Oh, I don’t know, doesn’t he look... _distinguished?_

Mrs Nash from just down their street sees him playing rock-paper-scissors with his son Richard in the grocery store to determine whether or not Richard is allowed ice cream, and Dr. Tozier is laughing because he’s winning, and he’s winning because Richard doesn’t know his father can see his little hidden hand reflected in the freezer cabinet, tucked behind his back. Richard’s laughing too even though he’s losing, and bleats, “Again! Dad again,” eyes shining big as planets with coke-bottle rings.

“Don’t you know what _best two out of three_ means? That was four draws ago.”

“No! No, I’ll win!” The boy shakes his head so hard his whole body rocks from side to side, then clings up at Dr. Tozier’s middle with sticky hands. His very... _trim_ middle. Helen’s own Rory, God love him, he enjoys a sudsy six-pack too much these days to keep a middle like that. “Two outta three! _Three_ ice creams please Dad please please Dad please watch I can count to a hundred—”

“Well, we’re not playing hide-and-go-seek right now, Rich. And I beat you, didn't I?”

“Yeah!”

“Right. So why don’t you go get Dad _six_ apples instead, alright? If you can do a hundred, six’ll be pie.” Dr. Tozier claps his big hands gentle to the boy’s round cheeks, until they goldfish.

 _“Easy as,”_ they chant together. Helen props herself up with the handles of her own cart, the can of little hotdogs going slack in her hand.

“Six apples, then come right back. You got that, doc? You pick the color.”

Richard nods like he’s trying to detach his own head. Dr. Tozier puts one hand just briefly on Richard’s dark mophead hair, like he’s giving the boy a blessing for his apple adventure. His hand is really quite broad, thinks Helen, popped out square at the thumb-joint.

 _Matches that jawline of his,_ something whispers darkly in her stomach. Then the boy’s off, tearing down the aisle on a squeaking chariot of scuffed-gray sneakers and babbling what sounds like a Bugs Bunny impression, repeated on a loop. _What’s up doc what’s up doc what’s up doc,_ fading around the corner to the fruit. Peculiar. Helen once saw the Tozier boy eat a worm at the park while pushing her youngest on the swings, after another solemn-eyed little boy with a faceful of freckles had carefully presented it to him in the sandbox. Most peculiar.

Dr. Tozier watches him go, then turns back to the freezer cabinet, and sticks two cartons of ice cream into his shopping cart—the very sugary kind. And the man is a dentist!

Helen puts her hand on her chest to calm the trilling schoolgirl rush of her heart, and then stops herself at the sight of her own wedding ring. Get a hold of yourself, Mrs Nash! For Pete’s sake! She trundles her cart over for some chit-chat. _Afternoon Doctor,_ she says, _lovely weather._ A perfect neighborly opener. It is lovely; bright and warm and clear and golden, like honey outside. She’s quietly smug about her new blowout. Dr. Tozier is wearing a crisp shirt with buttons like neat soldiers and short sleeves, exposing lean forearms. Yes, a lovely day. Helen swallows.

“Yes, good for the lawn,” replies Dr. Tozier.

“We missed Margaret at book club this week,” Helen hedges.

“Oh, that’s right,” says Dr. Tozier, and the fine lines at the corners of his eyes when he grins are even more distracting without the facemask he’s usually wearing, when Helen drops in for her check-ups. He pushes his spectacles up the strong slope of his nose. They’re wiry like him, steely gray to match his eyes. “She meant for me to tell you, or Diana. Maggie’s been down Skowhegan way for the week at her mother’s. My mother-in-law is a woman of... nervous disposition, shall we say. Maggie didn’t think she’d cope with two Tozier men at once, now that Richie’s started losing his teeth.”

 _“Ohhh,”_ Helen coos. That must explain the ice cream. She puts her hand near to Dr. Tozier’s arm, then away, then near, then away again for good. A neighborly distance. Margaret is a lovely, lucky woman, even if she does wear flared pants. _Hippie to yuppie pipeline’s alive ‘n’ flowin’,_ Rory always grunts whenever the Toziers come up in conversation. Helen imagines a white picket fence between their bodies, and calms. “My Wendy was the same, I’m sure you remember.”

“Yes,” says Dr. Tozier mildly. “You brought her in six times as I recall it, Mrs Nash.”

 _Mrs Nash._ Honestly, like she’s his schoolteacher. It’s a little rude. Admittedly he does look quite, quite young with his faintly curling weekend-hair, if not for the new gray blazing a trail back from his temples like virgin snow. Helen is undeterred, even if something quivers inside at the thought of the word _virgin_ in conversation with Dr. Tozier. Music tinkles tinny through the ceiling speakers, and it puts Helen in mind of potted plants, or elevators. This is a _lovely_ chat. “Well, you hate to see them suffer, don’t you? I’m sure Richard’s the same, lots of tears—”

“No, actually, Richie keeps on finding things with which to hit himself in the face and knock out more teeth,” Dr. Tozier interjects. He raises his eyebrows and speaks hushed, as if this is a secret for Helen’s ears alone. The thought makes her dizzy. “It’s my fault, I made the mistake of giving him a quarter for the first one. That’s why he’s not invited to Grandma’s. Lots of antiques.”

“Oh,” says Helen, taken aback. She has three girls; little boy behavior is as yet mystifying. “Well.”

“I’m joking, Helen,” Dr. Tozier says cheerfully.

“Oh. I—I see. What a relief.”

He opens a freezer chest to examine a bag of frozen peas. “Maggie’s mom is deaf as white cat, she’d never notice.”

Helen tries to wipe her clammy hands on her dress without being obvious. Her face is hot, but she hopes her cardigan conceals the effect that the chill of the freezer aisle is having under her bra. She also hopes that it doesn’t.

He really does have such a _pleasant_ face, always with an air of casual, amused expectancy hanging around him. Haloing him, like that bright yellow light above the chair in his practice, blocked out when he leans over and slips his fingers inside. Helen supposes that’s what graduating medical school must do to a man, what marrying young and fathering young and having one’s own practice by the end of such a turbulent decade as the nineteen-seventies must elicit. The ability to put people at ease, to—to say _open wide_ and know the people of Derry trust him enough to comply. To open themselves. Helen’s breathing catches. Dr. Tozier idly checks his sensible watch, still smiling the unhurried smile of a man who very rarely does his own grocery shopping anymore. Everyone knows you pick up the ice cream last.

Helen gathers herself. This is the longest conversation she has entertained with Dr. Tozier without children or the squeaking of latex gloves between them, and she’s gripped by the terribly silly need to be interesting. “Speaking of white cats, I couldn’t help noticing your _hair,_ Wentworth—”

_“DADDY!”_

Dr. Tozier blanches, whipping around to scan the end of the aisle. He is a long line of tense instinct tuned to thrum into action at one specific frequency, knuckles white on the cart handle. His cart bumps into Helen’s. It is _thrilling._

“Fuck,” Dr. Tozier mutters, and that’s thrilling too, he _swore,_ oh, the boy’s probably fine Wentworth, don’t go, why don’t we just stay right here with the frozen goods and—

Then Richard comes barrelling back down the aisle like a colt on new legs covered in old Band-Aids, with his arms full. The fluorescent strip-lights gleam white on Dr. Tozier’s broad shoulders and he sags, like snow dropping from a branch, with relief.

“Hey, lunkhead,” he says, sounding shaky, but Richard is only five and would never know it. He’s babbling again. Seems to Helen like the boy’s as a hydrant overflowing on a hot day; entertaining and welcomed at first, until it becomes a nuisance when you begin to understand it won’t shut off, and have to call the fire department.

 _“Nyyeeeeeah,”_ Richard greets his father, tousled and bug-eyed with clear adoration, breathing hard from his Supermarket Sweep. Then he makes the carrot-noise. _Looks like Bugs,_ Helen thinks of the boy’s new adult front teeth, the beaverish jut of them exacerbated by his missing canines on either side. Then she feels abruptly un-neighborlike for being jealous of a child for his father’s attention, good grief.

Dr. Tozier regards his son for a long moment. Then says, “What’s up, doc?” in a spot-on Mel Blanc whine. Richard giggles so hard his too-big glasses start slipping. “How many apples is that?”

“Gotta apples and I was _gonna_ put ‘em in a bag but I forgot and Dad, Daddy look, s’a dinosaur on the box for _my_ dinner when Mommy’s at Grandma’s—”

Dr. Tozier sighs, putting one hand on his hip and dragging the other over his clean-shaven mouth, watching Richard drop his armfuls everywhere, scattering the linoleum. He has two apples, four boxes of brightly colored cereal, a handful of pencils topped with cartoon-character erasers, and a kiwi fruit. For a moment, Helen sees the shining enamel of Dr. Tozier’s _everything-will-work-out-with-another-cup-of-coffee_ amusement slip, wear away to worry underneath.

“Rich,” he says, interrupting Richard’s blabbermouth, firm and patient. Helen’s thighs burn suddenly under her skirts at the tone of his voice, and she looks down, rearranging her own groceries. She should leave them to get on. She could offer to help. Margaret’s out of town, poor things, they probably haven’t eaten a cooked meal all week!

“Richie,” Dr. Tozier says again. “Listen and pay attention when Mom or me ask you to do something, remember? How many apples did I ask you to get?”

Richard has to crane his neck to meet his father’s eyes. Dr. Tozier is one of the tallest fathers in the Derry Elementary catchment zone, Helen has checked. “Six!”

“And how many’ve you got, Elmer Fudd?”

“Um.” Richard’s pale little face creases in thought, then brightens. When he speaks again his voice is strange, accented. _“Twooo.”_

“Some apple hunter you are, huh.”

“Sorry, Daddy.”

“That’s fine.” Dr. Tozier stoops to gather Richard’s detritus, and Helen knows she has something to contribute, watching the boy stick one of the pencils up his nose.

“You know, apples are very good for you,” she says. Richard turns to her, slack-jawed, as if seeing her for the first time. “You should listen to your Daddy, Richard, an apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

Richard stares for another few seconds. Then he bites down on his boogery pencil so that it threads through the gaps in his teeth, and hollers. _“MY FRIEND BILL SAID THAT’S A PILE OF BULLSHIT.”_

“No shouting indoors, Rich,” says Dr. Tozier, still gathering. Helen rocks a step backwards in shock, clinging to her cart like a life-preserver.

“Bill and my’s friend Eddie eats a thousand apples and sees the doctor _all the time though_ Dad, and Miss Spiegel said if we eat apples we don’t have to see the doctors but Eddie eats them and—Bill said—”

“Pile of bullshit, yeah, I liked it. Bill’s an eloquent guy,” says Dr. Tozier. This is the second time Helen has ever heard him curse in as many minutes. It comes out easy and amused as everything else does in his pleasant tenor. His legs and his jaw are so lean and angular that Helen can see the suggestion, the shadow of the shape of his perfect, swearing teeth through his cheek as he grins helplessly at his son, the fruit of his loins and someone else’s loins who _isn’t Helen,_ and all of a sudden she feels a slick pulse of wet heat, up between her thighs.

She squeaks. Flutters her hand to her face without knowing why, perhaps to catch the noise before Dr. Tozier notices, just another quivering Derry leaf tossed along by his breezy manner. He looks up anyway, with a frown.

“Everything alright, Helen?”

“Just—fine, yes,” she manages. Dr. Tozier is still down on one knee, kindly face level with her skirts. She can see right down under his starched collar from this angle, a slivering glimpse of smooth, dark hair. _No undershirt._ Helen has lain naked against Rory’s nakedness before without feeling this alive, in every part of her body. She feels like a heart, beating.

“Oh, hang on.” Dr. Tozier says, eyes widening, and turns Richard by the shoulders to face her. One pencil for each nostril, now. “Apologize to Mrs Nash for cussing, Richie.”

“Sorry!” Richard shouts, sounding less like he’s apologizing and more like he’s just deemed Helen _it_ during a game of tag.

Helen is still floating in a dazed state of mild panic. Like a prey-mouse, bewitched into slack compliance by her own body’s snaking desires. “That’s alright, dear.”

 _F-word,_ Dr. Tozier had said. Maybe cussing could be quite neighborly when applied in the right context, thinks Helen.

“You mentioned my hair, earlier,” says Dr. Tozier, straightening back up with a knowing sort of arch to his eyebrow as he smiles genially at Helen. He tilts his head down at Richard. “There’s the reason. Every last one, sprinkled onto my head at the tender age of thirty-two by the great salt-and-pepper shaker of fatherhood. Especially this week, with Maggie on sabbatical. Had to bring you to work with me, didn’t I, buckaroo?”

Richard bites and swings and tugs on his father’s long arm, a tearaway kitten with a much obliging scratching post. Dr. Tozier hardly seems to notice. “Yeah! Daddy’s got fishes at work!”

Dr. Tozier grimaces slightly at Helen, but also as if he’s seeing right through her to some past unnamable horror. “I liked those fish. Calmed down the nervy patients.” He sighs again.

Helen wonders briefly whether or not the residents of Dr. Tozier’s waiting-room fish tank suffered the same fate as that worm in the park, and decides she’d rather not know.

“Well, you needn’t worry about it,” she says, gamely. She watches her hand reach towards Dr. Tozier’s silver-black brindle, then snatches it back from his bland expression to brush the tips of her own feathered-out hair. “The gray, I mean.”

Dr. Tozier blinks.

“It’s very—that is to say, you look, it makes you look, I mean, I think it’s—”

Dr. Tozier’s left eyebrow joins his right, raised up high.

A tidy little jet of hysteria shoots up from Helen’s knotting stomach to spin like a top in her chest. She hears herself stutter out the word, _“Dashing,”_ and immediately wishes to flee the store, leaving her cart abandoned like so much collateral damage.

But Dr. Tozier only barks a laugh, a short, smooth _hah_ like everything else he says. Entirely unperturbed. “Well, thank you.”

 _Too_ unperturbed. Helen is struck by a sudden bolt of terror, at the thought of the things Dr. Tozier must surely hear every day, when people are lulled by the hypnotically intimate environment of a dentist’s chair and a touch of the laughing gas. Oh, this is terrible. Her face is on fire.

“But they—they make products for men now,” she says, and why, oh _why_ can’t she stop talking? “Hair dyes, I mean, if it really does bother you? I’ve seen them in Keene’s.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” says Dr. Tozier, looking down at Richard then with a soft edge, at his bouncing noise and scabbed knees and gently curling hair like a black spaniel’s. Like his father’s. “I find I’m rather grateful for it, truth be told.”

“Plus,” he continues, as if Helen wasn’t already melting harder than the Tozier’s ice cream, as if Johnny Kitchener the shop-boy isn’t going to have to come along with a mop and bucket to clean up on aisle seven. “Maggie’d kill me if I got rid of it.”

Then Dr. Tozier _winks._

Oh Lord, oh Lord, Helen’s whole ribcage is so tight she can’t squeeze out a reply, because who could blame dear, pretty, annoyingly friendly, lucky, lucky, _lucky_ Margaret for that when Doctor Wentworth Tozier DMD is so—

So _f—_

So _fffffff—_

So _fiddlesticksing handsome!_

“Well, we’d best not keep you, Helen. This one is in dire need of a bath before his mother sees him, and hands me a divorce on the spot,” Dr. Tozier says, when another few moments have passed and all Helen can do is try to desperately smooth the creases from her breathing. He’s humming mild interest at something Richard is saying, knelt back down to the linoleum to tie the boy’s loose-worm laces presumably before he gives himself any more skinned knees, and they’re _leaving._ Dr. Tozier is leaving, and Helen hasn’t done anything but act like a ninny this entire time. She doesn’t want him to think her a ninny, a simpleton. She wants him to leave this bright, liminal church of bold colors and jazzy waiting-room music and return to his lemon-yellow two-storey house thinking _my, what a lovely chat I had with Helen Nash._

She wants to linger, as he lingers. Like an amiable spirit hanging over the women’s group at church, waiting to be summoned at a moment’s eager notice. _I bumped into Dr. Tozier at Palmer’s on Saturday,_ she’ll say to the other jealous ladies, with triumph, _and we had such a nice talk. He called me Helen._

“And when—when does Margaret get home?” she blurts. A very secret part of Helen wants Dr. Tozier to leave this conversation with Helen and his wife both, entwined by association in his mind. She tries very hard not to think about the Toziers divorcing, because that is un-neighborly, and feels least neighborly of all when a dopey, dreamy look crosses Dr. Tozier’s face like a brief sunbeam at her question.

“Ah. Tonight. Not too late, hopefully.” He jerks one of his knuckley thumbs at his shopping cart, licking the other to wipe something unidentifiable from Richard’s grubby face. “That’s why we’re here, stocking up for her miraculous return. Like a couple of noble emperor penguins in Antarctica, eh Rich?”

“Penguins like from Batman! _Ka-pow.”_

Helen takes a peek into their cart, curiosity getting the better of her now that permission is granted. Dr. Tozier might not know it, but looking into another person’s cart is bad grocery etiquette, especially in a town like Derry, where gossip grows like a fungus in every sweaty and close little huddle of people. Not that Helen would know about that. Anyway, there isn’t much to gossip about besides the unfortunately liquefied ice-cream, the _severe_ lack of crunchy vegetables characteristic of a young man in 1981 trying to provide for a tooth-shedding son, and—

A little cardboard box. Tossed unashamedly between the Wonderbread and a magazine about sports. Prophylactics. _Rubbers._

_36-pack, XL._

Helen knows her jaw is hanging open and strains to close it, the back of her neck and her shoulders feeling hot and tight and shuddery. She kneads a fist into her skirts. Crosses her legs at the ankles as demurely as she knows how, because the very last thing she needs is for frank, sensible Dr. Tozier to see right through her with that easy _doctor-patient-confidentiality_ smile, and know she’s soaking through her underwear at the sight of his Saturday grocery run, and all it implies.

Dr. Tozier is laughing, nudging Richard in the direction of the register, or perhaps the apples. _“Ka-pow_ is right. I’ll make sure to use that on Mom, thanks. Say hello to Rory for us, Helen. Have a nice day,” he says from over his shoulder, startling her. Holds up one long hand in a wave with a grin, and is gone, shadowing the boy’s haphazard attempts to push the cart despite not being able to see where he’s going.

Helen stands amongst the humming freezers, trembling. “You too,” she rasps, but Dr. Tozier has rounded the corner, and is evidently going to have a nice day and a much nicer night, regardless of whether Helen wishes it for him or not.

All the bright little branded characters are watching her from their shelves, a silent jury. Helen Nash opens a freezer cabinet with a weak arm, and stands there for a while, staring at a leg of ham and thinking cooling, neighborly thoughts.

**Author's Note:**

> shrug emoji
> 
> write the fic you want to see in the world, folks


End file.
